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Why are we trying to save Casa Loma when we could just tear it down?

By Brett PopplewellStaff Reporter

Sun., May 22, 2011

Atop Spadina Rd. there stands a house like no other in the city, country or continent.

A neglected heritage site that attracts tourists, yes, but that remains, like most other heritage sites in town, of little consequence to Torontonians who have neither time nor interest to visit its oak-trimmed halls and Roman stone walls.

For 100 years, Casa Loma has both captured and lost the public’s imagination. Of all of Toronto’s relics, it has somehow avoided the wrecking ball that has demolished almost everything and anything built in Toronto before 1940 — a fact that might be considered outrageous if one considers that Casa Loma is, and always has been, a work in progress.

Designed by Toronto’s greatest architect, E.J. Lennox, its 98 rooms housed one of Canada’s richest men between 1914 and 1923.

But it was never finished because the master of the casa went broke.

And in the 88 years since Sir Henry Pellatt was forced out of its palatial rooms, Casa Loma has lacked a purpose.

Today it stands alone on a hill, concealed from view by foliage, apartment towers and scaffolding. And like Old Fort York and most of Toronto’s heritage sites, it has been neglected by Toronto and its citizens, who have an exceptional ability to neither honour nor preserve their heritage.

But now the city has inexplicably decided to save Pellat’s castle. For what?

Consider this: It’s not a real castle. It has no moat, no dungeon, no royal affiliation. It’s an old house on a hill that can’t seem to attract enough sightseers to pay for its own upkeep.

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Yet it has its supporters — including Gary Miedema, chief historian with Heritage Toronto, who says Casa Loma must be preserved.

“The building itself is obviously a landmark in the city without rival. It’s a fabulous and really astonishing building,” he says. “The fact that it was designed by E.J. Lennox, (designer) of Old City Hall, fabled as the builder of Toronto, certainly makes it more exceptional.”

But the whole Lennox argument doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because Toronto doesn’t care about Lennox. If Torontonians did, his Bond Street Congregational Church would not have sat abandoned near Yonge and Dundas Sts. until it burned down in 1981.

Still, Miedema insists Casa Loma is “special.”

“It truly is one of our greatest tourist sites,” he says.

And yet the building’s annual attendance is dropping by 5 per cent per year.

“Often Torontonians maybe look at the castle and roll their eyes,” Miedema acknowledges.

“It’s the same reason we look at the CN Tower and roll our eyes,” he goes on. “When it’s on our own turf, it’s maybe taken for granted.”

For years, Toronto has struggled over what to do with Pellatt’s so-called castle.

First they tried to turn it into a hotel. That failed. Then it was a music venue. That failed. Then it was abandoned. That worked. Then it was cleaned up and turned into some quasi-museum/event venue. Now that too has failed.

The Kiwanis Club has run the inside of Casa Loma for the past 74 years, but last week, the city agreed to pay $1.45 million for certain artifacts and trademarks from the struggling attraction, including its name.

Maybe Hugh Blake McLachlan was right when, on April 6, 1937, he told The Toronto DailyStar it was “ridiculous” to suggest Casa Loma might ever be of any use. Maybe the city should have followed his suggestion, torn Casa Loma down and used the materials to erect small homes on the site.

Or maybe McLachlan wasn’t thinking big enough.

After all, Casa Loma is sitting on five acres of relatively undeveloped property in the Spadina-Davenport area — prime real estate for a 20-storey condo complex.

Buy it, then sell it and the city might get back some, if not all, of that $1.45 million. Resell the name and the property to one of the city’s many condo developers and let them build us another glass tower in which to house our people.

That, according to Charles Hazell, local architect, is a terrible idea.

And yet that is the mindset that has allowed thousands of Torontonians to enjoy the waterfront from the comforts of their lakeshore towers.

If only we’d listened to McLachlanall those years ago we would have avoided spending $20 million over the last 12 years repairing the castle’s outer walls — repairs that came as a direct result of neglect after the city discovered in the late 1990s that the castle was about to collapse and kill someone.

Hazell has been in charge of those repairs. He has worked hard so that the castle might stand intact for another 80 years. Even he admits it would have been easier to have just let it fall down.

“It’s the easiest thing to do to stomp on the things that come through the soil in the spring,” he says.

“You know Toronto is a city that has already lost 85 per cent of its historic buildings,” Hazell says.

And yet we still have Old City Hall, Union Station, Casa Loma — all of which have been up for demolition at one point or another.

“At root is this difficulty that Toronto has in growing out from its context,” Hazell says. “Toronto’s always looking for something to come in and dump on that context. It’s afraid of things. It’s afraid of itself, afraid of its waterfront, afraid of its history.”

And so we destroy all that, either intentionally or by neglect.

It’s the Toronto way.

Why else would this country’s original Parliament buildings be resting under a parking lot at the corner of Parliament and Front? Why else would Montgomery’s Tavern — staging ground for the 1837 rebellion — be now just a plaque near Yonge St. and Eglinton Ave.?

So now why is the city stepping in to save Casa Loma when we agreed to let Walnut Hall, the last remaining row of Georgian townhouses, fall down in 2007? Why save the castle when we just rid ourselves of the Empress Hotel — that 120-year-old eyesore on Yonge St. that burned down in January. Why save Casa Loma when it too might be replaced by something like the towering 160-room hotel that Parasuco wants to build above what’s left of those two abandoned neoclassical banks on Yonge St.?

Honestly — why?

“There’s a straight commercial value, which is tourism,” says Michael Williams, the city’s general manager for economic development and culture.

“People don’t come to see parking lots and stores. People come to cities to see a history and a vibrancy and historical buildings provide that.”

And there’s a reason Toronto doesn’t have the history of Quebec City or old Montreal, he says. It’s because we tore it down.

That’s what we do, Hazell says.

But for the odd occasion when tree-hugging architectural lovers have stood before the bulldozers to protect things like Old City Hall or Union Station (as they did in the 1970s) this city has generally chosen to either demolish its history or neglect it.

Yet now we struggle, Williams says. Struggle over who’s going to pay for the footbridge to Old Fort York. Struggle over who’s going to pay to sandblast the graffiti off the bricks inside Casa Loma.

And for what?

So the children can enjoy Old Fort York? It’s a grassy knoll with a few cannons on display.

And Casa Loma? It’s a drafty old relic, but one Hazell and others recognize as a symbol. A symbol of a town whose citizens once dared to dream that Toronto might actually stand as the second city of the British Empire.

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